A Boulder startup made its official introduction onto the market Friday with an announcement at the WebAssembly conference in Barcelona that it raised a $6.6 million seed round.
The startup, Dylibso, creates software that helps developers build with the WebAssembly programming language, which is often referred to as WASM. Developers often struggle to use WebAssembly because of it's lack of tooling, and Dylibso aims to make the work more seamless.
“We look forward to partnering with our customers and investors to innovate in the WebAssembly ecosystem and solve many developer pain points felt today," co-founder and CEO Steve Manuel said in a statement. "With the systems and tooling we're building, WASM should be the compilation target of choice for all developers shipping code.”
Felicis Ventures led Dylibso's seed investing round, and Boldstart Ventures, Pebblebed and Crew Capital also participated.
Shomik Ghosh, a partner at Boldstart Ventures, said that the firm had heard from multiple developers who have explored using WebAssembly but decided against using it because of challenges with the technology.
One of the ways Dylibso is aiming to make it easier is through its first product, Modsurfer, which helps developers debug and investigate code. The startup launched Modsurfer in a beta version Friday.
Manuel started Dylibso in Boulder last year with co-founders Zachary Shipko and Benjamin Eckel. The startup also has offices in Los Angeles and New Orleans.
In a blog post Friday, Manuel said the startup is dedicating its efforts toward making the WebAssembly technology "as usable and production-ready as possible." He explained Dylibso's software as the last mile from development to production.
"We have years of experience running large, reliable systems and have found that many of the necessary tools, services and peripheral system software is either outright missing support for WebAssembly, or is just too difficult to make work," Manuel wrote.
